Night became morning and I went back.

  Not to the house. Not to the room that contained absence. To the garden. His garden. The three pots at the edge of the path, the blade fragment, the stone. The collection he had assembled.

  Two of the pots were dead.

  The dock grass had turned brown and dried, the stems collapsed inward — a plant that had lost its water source because no one had watered it for the days between the battle and now.

  The nettle-cousin was the same — brown, curled, the leaves fallen from stems that were stalks that were sticks that were dead.

  Two wrong herbs, chosen by a child who still knew little about herbs. The charm of knowing nothing was irrelevant now. The relevance died with the watering.

  The third pot, however. The lemongrass — right by accident, the one he'd chosen without knowing what he was choosing, the herb that worked because it had root structure, biological investment in substrate that the other two lacked.

  It was alive.

  Green in the morning grey, green among the brown circle of my proximity and the dead pots and the general browning of everything within three paces. it was still growing, the stems upright, the leaves extended, alive.

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  I picked it up.

  The pot. Heavier than expected — earth, clay, root mass. The weight of a small thing that contained a smaller thing that was alive.

  My fingertips were numb — the qi-emission had turned inward as well as outward, feedback from sustained uncontrolled emission. The things I touched were barely felt. The pot was present in my hands by pressure, not by texture.

  Earth crumbled at the rim. A pot watered days ago, sufficient for the roots but not for the surface. Earth fell onto the dirt in small amounts, brown on brown.

  I held it.

  The pot sat in my hands with the lemongrass extending upward from the soil — green in the grey, alive in the dead.

  I didn't know why I was holding it. The thing that moved my hands to the pot was not a decision but a reflex — the same kind of reflex Wei had when he heard moaning. The involuntary orientation toward the thing that was alive in the space where alive was rare.

  I held it. And it didn't die. In my hands.

  Within the three-pace radius that killed grass, dropped insects, weakened trees and nauseated people. Alive. Green. Holding.

  I sat somewhere at the edge between the settlement and the forest. The space between the place where people were and the place where I was. The boundary, the margin.

  The pot stood beside me, upright, the lemongrass extending green.

  I sat with the pot. In the margin. In the grey morning that was grey the way mornings were grey when the person who made mornings bright was not in them.

  The settlement behind me was damaged but standing, the people in it alive and cautious, maintaining the distance my radius required.

  The forest ahead was green, weakened at the edges by my proximity but green beyond and the world continued.

  Between them — me, sitting with a pot that did not wilt.

  No sound. No wind. No voice, no argument, no complaint about the herbs, no declaration about cultivation, no stubbornness embodied in a fourteen-year-old body that moved through the world as if the world owed him an explanation and the explanation was overdue.

  Silence.

  The pot's green.